PRESENT TENSE:THERE WERE a lot of people hoping Avatar would fail. Plenty of critics, particularly those with a fondness for subtlety and storytelling, suggested it might be the biggest turkey of all time. The teaser trailer was met with universal derision and ridicule. It seemed that James Cameron, the self-proclaimed king of the world, was going to lose his crown in a big way with his 3D sci-fi yarn, the belated follow-up to the all-conquering Titanic.
Less than a month after its release, however, Avataris second only to Cameron's other epic in the all-time high-grossing list, earning more than $1 billion in just 17 days, and it is widely being hailed as the greatest advance in film-making since the introduction of colour.
The film is not without its flaws, of course. Cameron should really have spent some of the 15-year gestation period – a week here and there, say – writing a decent script (there are TV commercials with more convincing characters) while its plot is the gangly, blue-skinned child of Dances with Wolvesand FernGully: The Last Rainforest.
But these criticisms are nothing compared to the hackles being raised by a number of US conservatives, for whom Avatarrepresents the apotheosis of Hollywood liberalism. Its story of a 22nd-century attempt by humans to mine a distant planet called Pandora, and the adventures of one soldier who becomes a member of the indigenous tribe of nature-loving 10ft blue cat people called the Na'vi, eventually leading their insurrection against the colonisers, is being criticised as anti-military, anti-industry, anti-American, even anti-human. Granted, these are the sort of people for whom everything, from Hummers to Harry Potter, is a partisan issue, but even without a starring role for Sean Penn or Tim Robbins, Avatarhas them riled.
John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard's film critic and a former Reagan speechwriter, wrote: " Avataris an undigested mass of cliches . . . taken directly from the revisionist westerns of the 1960s – the ones in which the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys," while he points out that "the conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency". Meanwhile, Armond White in the New York Presswrote: "Appealing to Iraq war disenchantment, he evokes 9/11 when the military topples the Na'vi's sacred, towering Tree of Souls. The imagery implies that the World Trade Center was also an altar (of US capitalism), yet this berserk analogy exposes Cameron's contradictory thinking. It triggers the offensive battle scenes where American soldiers get vengefully decimated."
Cameron being Cameron, he does rather hammer us with the Iraq war analogy, weaving in phrases such as "winning hearts and minds", "shock and awe" and "fighting terror with terror", but the pernicious corporation and the trigger-happy military figure are well-established cinematic tropes. How many films feature a corporate executive as the hero? Exactly. As for criticism of the film's environmentalism, it is reminiscent of the controversy around Wall-E, which, according to some US conservatives, was pure leftist climate-change propaganda. Cameron hasn't reinvented the wheel.
What he has done, however, is create an immense, stupefying entertainment the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Its many deficiencies don’t prevent it from being an astonishing spectacle that must be seen to be believed, and it is raking it in at the moment because people realise they better go see it at the cinema, and in 3D to boot. There is no point waiting for the DVD.
The counter-argument to the grumpy conservatives, of course, is that Avatar's success is directly attributable to its themes. However, the tendency to project social significance onto the success of mass entertainment such as Avatar is a fairly unrewarding theoretical exercise. The Dark Knight's massive box office, for instance, wasn't evidence that people want vigilantes to invent invasive surveillance techniques in order to protect us – it was evidence that people wanted to see Batman and the Joker go mano a mano.
No, Avataris succeeding due to its breathtaking visuals rather than its trite "message". I suspect in a few years people will feel somewhat perplexed by the Avatarphenomenon, just as many people recall their initial enthusiasm for Titanicwith a degree of embarrassment. By the time Avataris the Christmas Day TV movie in a few years time, it may have lost its lustre, its technological achievements might not seem so wondrous, its imagined world might seem gaudy rather than awe-inspiring.
But even if it manages to retain its ability to astound, I somehow doubt we’ll recall it as the moment the world turned against military imperialism or vowed to embrace environmental sustainability.
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is resting
